Profile

Gillian Carnegie

Sunsets, flowers, trees and her own bottom are the subjects that intrigue 34-year-old Gillian Carnegie. The "bum paintings", based on photographs she took of her own posterior, have achieved some notoriety - one of them, Mabel, featured in Tate Britain's 2003 show, Days Like These.

Carnegie works in the medium favoured by Turner himself, oil paint. She trained at the Camberwell School of Art, did an MA in painting at the Royal College of Art and went straight into the New Contemporaries Show in 1998.

She often works in series: in Fleurs d'Huile 2001, a bunch of flowers in a cut-off plastic bottle are revisited as the blooms wither.

Her approach, as her biography in the Tate catalogue has it, is to follow the conventions of representational painting while challenging its established languages and unsettling its assumptions. Her series of Black Square Paintings refer explicitly to Kasimir Malevich's infamous Black Square painting of 1913. But in Carnegie's version, detailed, night-time woodland scenes emerge from an apparently impenetrable mass of sticky, black paint, to offer "a retort to the macho modernist tradition of the monochrome".

Through exploring the act of painting itself she capitalises on the "tension between the subject matter and the physicality of the paint" - so ensuring that, although she eschews press interviews, the controlling hand of the artist is everywhere apparent.